Quarter Date intervals definition in AX2012

Fiscal calendars provide a framework for the financial activity of an organization. Each fiscal calendar contains one or more fiscal years, and each fiscal year contains multiple periods. Fiscal calendars can be based on a January 1 to December 31 calendar year, or on any dates that you select. In this document we will consider a situation where a fiscal calendar that starts on May 1 of one year and ends on April 30 of the following year.

You see that the Q1 starts on May 1 and ends on July 31. When users are working in standard AX environment they can select on several reports Date interval used for the report. E.g. on the Trial balance report user can set the Date interval to Q1:

But results are not what user expected. The "From date" is April 1 and "To date" is September 30. This is caused by the standard Date intervals definition in the AX database. Date interval is a setup in which you can get the result with different combinations of parameters. In the standard AX the Q1 date interval is defined as follows:

In the parameter “After” the option is “Quarter” - that option is mapped and limited to fiscal years whenever the from date is coincident with a natural quarter. It means when the fiscal year starts on January 1st, April 1st, July 1st or October 1st. In our example Fiscal year starts on May 1 and system evaluates that the date falls into natural quarter starting on April 1st. This is the reason of results on screenshot nr.2.

In order to get expected results on the Trial balance report it is necessary to adjust Date interval definition in following way:

If we use in the "After" parameter option "Periods", and we adjust the +/- calculation for "To date", then the system calculates both dates correctly. Now the Trial balance report returns correct results: